Seagate and AMD demo 6 Gb SATA just in time

Seagate and AMD are the first to demonstrate a complete implementation of 6 Gb SATA today in New Orleans. 3 Gb/sec SATA is standard today. 6 Gb/sec interfaces will ship on products in late 2009, none too soon for industry needs.

Why should you care?

1. Storage device throughputs (disk drives and SSD) are approaching the 3 Gb/sec SATA speed limit. For disk drives, it’s important for the external interface to be faster than the storage device. Otherwise, drives start to skip revolutions when reading and writing data. Skipped revolutions are like a sputtering car engine: they slow things down even further.

2. Interface speeds aren’t keeping up with capacity. It’s taking longer and longer to fill and empty a SATA drive. Anything that can be done to speed up the flow is valuable. The drive is the bottleneck, as it should be (see 1. above). Still, the interface speed has to be there as well.

6 Gb/sec SATA will get here just in time for hardcore PC users and gamers.